At the end of June, a coalition led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation trolled the NSA by air, hiring a huge blimp to hover over the agency's new data center in Utah. Now, the EFF has released a huge image of the high-security center. It's both banal and terrifying.

As Cory Doctorow points out, this is one of the first high-res—and free—images of the data center to emerge, and it should help the thousands of news outlets who need art for the endless strings of NSA stories. Here's the high-res version, definitely zoom in for the full effect:

This picture makes clear the scope and scale of the NSA's facilities—necessary because of the agency's "collect it all" posture and misguided dedication to creating ever-larger haystacks in pursuit of needles. Alongside our other efforts to bring accountability to massive NSA spying, hopefully this image can help make the infrastructure of that spying more tangible to the public.

It certainly does—it also helps make the utter banality of the operation tangible. Nestled in a picturesque front range of rural Utah, the NSA goes about its work. [BoingBoing]